Neocolonial Strategy

Israel and Turkey have long been the UK and United States’ key intelligence and security partners in the Middle East, a role they exploit to safeguard their respective occupations of Palestine and Kurdistan. To understand how these geostrategic relationships relate to domestic repression in the UK, counterterrorism must be seen as an extension of earlier colonial approaches, feeding into Cold War strategies directed against communist and Third World movements. Drawing on racist notions of a civilizational threat to the West, imperial states have entrenched Western power through military intervention and intensive intelligence operations.

Throughout the Cold War, Israel worked hard to represent “terrorism” as irrational and illegitimate — a projectspearheaded by Benjamin Netanyahu himself at the Jonathan Institute, which he founded, naming it after his brother who died during a raid to recover hostages from a hijacking by Palestinian insurgents. The Jonathan Institute held two major conferences on the topic of “international terrorism” in Jerusalem and Washington in the 1970s and ’80s. Israeli politicians, military analysts, and academics represented the Palestinian liberation struggle as uniquely violent and dangerous, erasing the political reasoning behind armed struggle to demonize Palestinian political actors as inherently barbaric.

As Lisa Stampnitzky writes in Disciplining Terror, terrorism was no longer spoken about as criminality but rather as total irrationality. In an increasingly paranoid security landscape, political violence by anti-colonial nonstate actors came to be seen as an existential threat. By the end of the Cold War, these narratives had been fully embraced by US neoconservatives — and would reach their full power following the 9/11 attacks and the United States’ unilateral declaration of a global “war on terror.” Endlessly regurgitated by the ever-growing field of “security experts,” many of whom are employed by arms companies, the war on terror rhetoric also fueled enormous and lucrative growth in military and surveillance technologies.

Terrorists Everywhere

Israel has benefited from this reconceptualization of “terror” to quell global opposition to its genocide. “That ‘t’ word is scary. People think of the 7/7 [2005] London bombings or 9/11. But that’s not what Palestine Action ever was,” the DOJ spokesperson says.

Turkey has also played a crucial role in this process. Notably Ankara has worked hard to expand the war on terror beyond an Islamist threat, positioning regional liberation movements as globally significant “terrorist” actors. Turkey joined NATO in 1952 and has played a linchpin role in entrenching US power across the region ever since, acting initially as a counterweight to Soviet power and subsequently as an enforcer of US interests.

Throughout the Cold War, the United States invested heavily in developing a secretive CIA-led counterinsurgency project in Turkey, specifically targeting left-wing and Kurdish movements. US military support for Turkey has grown year over year since the 1960s. To this day, Turkey commands the second-largest armed forces in NATO and hosts crucial US nuclear assets. Still, the relationship between Turkey and the United States involves more friction than Israeli-US collaboration, and Turkish politicians have spent several decades lobbying for international recognition of Kurdish insurgency as a global terrorist threat. This rhetoric also intensified following 9/11, with Turkish politicians castigating Western powers for not taking Kurdish “terrorism” seriously enough and arguing that the war on terror can only succeed if it combats political violence everywhere — not just that which poses a direct threat to the US.

The result is a political stalemate. The United States, UK, and other Western governments frequently treat support for Palestinian or Kurdish liberation as illegitimate violence outside acceptable political norms, thus shutting down channels for peaceful, political, and nonviolent opposition. Both Turkey and Israel have used the counterterrorism infrastructure of the post-9/11 era to entrench their own positions as part of this supposed “West” threatened by “terrorist” violence. Further, they have strengthened their material relationships with Western allies, deepening intelligence collaboration and receiving increasing military aid from the US while condemning whole populations to permanent criminalization and occupation.

Legal Sledgehammer

The UK’s Terrorism Act was passed in 2000 — already suggesting this power cannot be viewed as a knee-jerk response to post-9/11 counterterror hysteria. “The Terrorism Act is not fit for purpose,” the DOJ spokesperson says. “It’s meant to protect the public from acts of terrorism, but now it’s protecting corporate and foreign state interests.”

While the original act primarily proscribed Islamist groups, it also included the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), alongside other secular and leftist groups engaged in regional and national liberation struggles, largely based on reasoning derived from secret intelligence. From the outset, laws marketed to the UK public as guaranteeing its “safety” against terrorist attacks have been used to target other secular, national-liberation struggles — rather as the Palestine Action listing was parceled up with the listing of a neo-Nazi fringe organization called “Maniacs Murder Cult” to help push the decision through Parliament.

This has sometimes left the Kurdish movement in a farcical position. For one, the UK admits it does not consider the PKK a threat to British national security. “UK security data shows that even PKK sympathizers in the UK have not engaged in violence there, yet political interests override legal realities,” says Seyid Pirsus of the UK Kurdish Assembly’s Diplomacy Committee. More than that, the PKK itself partnered with the United States to rescue the Yezidi religious minority from genocide at the hands of ISIS, while the PKK’s Syrian affiliates remain allied with the US and UK as part of their ongoing campaign against the Islamic State. UK prosecutors have repeatedly attempted to bring cases against UK nationals joining the fight against ISIS. A judge overseeing one such case stated he was “uneasy” over the prosecution of so-called “acts of terrorism . . . carried out with the support of the RAF [Royal Air Force].” In this case, the Terrorism Act was seemingly used directly against UK security interests.

“On the morning of the raid, myself and another one of the now defendants had been invited to meet the minister for the Middle East at the Foreign Office for a commemoration of Yezidi women murdered by ISIS,” one defendant in the ongoing terror case against Kurdish community organizers in London tells Jacobin:

Instead, that same morning, I was in solitary confinement, being called a “terrorist” by a group of police interrogators. [Kurds] are allies when we enhance their image of defending human rights and “terrorists” when [the UK’s] security partnership with Turkey is becoming more lucrative.

These apparent contradictions make sense once the act is understood not as a neutral piece of legislation open to potential abuse but rather as a sledgehammer in the UK’s neo-imperialist toolkit. It furnishes the UK with a uniquely wide-ranging set of powers used not only to fragment domestic opposition and international solidarity but also to strengthen relationships with its authoritarian partners in the Middle East, while also gathering intelligence on their behalf.

Even as the courts fill up, UK police tactics long deployed against the Kurdish community are used to further repression and surveillance without even needing to proffer a justification for arrest. This includes the “Schedule 7” prerogative, which grants police and border officers the power to interrogate individuals without the right to silence and force access to their phones on pain of a jail sentence. This can be coupled with other repressive measures including stripping individuals of their bank accounts or the imposition of European travel bans on UK nationals to create a broader climate of suppression and surveillance.

“Demanding Kurdish linguistic and cultural rights is met with state violence, both in Turkey and in the UK,” the Kurdish defendant says. “Growing up in London, I saw my community being consistently targeted with raids, arrests, and surveillance, echoing the ways in which the Turkish state has criminalized Kurds for over a century.”

The New War on Terror

In the immediate future, these trends look set to continue. Even as the UK doubles down on its support for Israel, Tel Aviv has threatened to withdraw its intelligence cooperation with the UK over the possibility of British recognition for the Palestinian state. It’s a further reminder of how the West’s authoritarian regional partners advance their own agendas under cover of the UK’s neo-imperialist interests.

The current Turkish government has publicly trumpeted its opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza but is thus also seeking ways to reassert its indispensability to Western interests. In particular, like Tel Aviv, Ankara presents itself as a key Western partner against Iran. A general reduction in the United States’ boots-on-the-ground presence in the Middle East will mean increased reliance on Turkey and Israel to further the West’s agenda, in turn enabling both states to demand further concessions from the UK and the US.

Arms companies can profit at both ends of this relationship, perpetuating the Middle East’s forever wars to sell more weapons, while pushing for repression of the protests that have been particularly effective in targeting the military-industrial complex’s UK assets. The Palestine Action proscription came after protesters successfully targeted RAF planes with graffiti. The grubby revelation that a British Army chief successfully lobbied for the group to be proscribed on behalf of his new employers in the US defense industry should come as no surprise.

Similarly, UK Kurdish activists believe their detention and repression often track to freshly inked arms deals between Westminster and Ankara. “Whenever the UK has expectations from Turkey, pressure on the Kurdish diaspora tends to increase, in a pattern repeated over forty years,” Pirsus says, pointing to a meeting between UK foreign secretary David Lammy and his Turkish counterpart in the run-up to the UK Kurdish Community Centre raid. The two NATO partners have just signed a fresh, multibillion-pound fighter plane deal, suggesting more repression lies ahead.

These complex, converging agendas mean well-intentioned moral appeals over the apparent abuse of the UK’s counterterror laws are unlikely to stem the tide. Certainly the Palestine Action proscription and broader anti-genocide movement has catalyzed important coordination between religious, trade union, and other political movements, but this coordination will itself inspire further-reaching repression. “It’s not going to end with Palestine Action,” the DOJ spokesperson suggests. “If [far-right UK political party] Reform comes into power, we will see Greenpeace proscribed [and] trade unions proscribed.”

The Parliament Square protesters were dragged away under the gaze of a statue of Nelson Mandela, who was slandered as a terrorist by a series of British governments before he was elevated to his latter-day status as a human rights icon. The sculpture offers a physical reminder that the “terror” label is never really about protecting the British public — but always deployed to reinforce the continued imperialist commitments of UK foreign policy.